Computing or non-computing
professionals looking to improve their skills and
marketability in the age of automation.

Endorsed
by the Australian Computer Society

Participant ReactionLes's in depth knowledge and
experience provided an excellent professionally presented
course which is difficult to find in many of today's
training houses. I would rate this course as probably one
of the best I have attended. David Tein, CAA

In-house PresentationsC&A presents this workshop to both
in-house and public forums. The workshop may be tailored
for individual needs or presented in its standard format.
For example, C&A trained 60 analysts in the Health
Insurance Commission. The programme was also tailored to
a 3 day format for BHP IT.

Extensive Notes
IncludedAll workshop participants receive a 100
page work book providing a User Requirement Specification
Standard that can be put to work in real world projects.

The hardest single part of building a
software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other
part of the conceptual work is as difficult as establishing the
detailed technical requirements, including all the interfaces to
people, to machines, and to other software systems . No part of
the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other
part is more difficult to rectify later.

Fred Brooks - "No Silver Bullet"

One of the most frequent causes of failure in
software projects is a non existent or inadequate statement of
what the software is supposed to do. A relatively small amount of
effort spent in accurately specifying software requirements has
repeatedly generated large returns in developer productivity and
customer satisfaction.

Leverage Limited Resources

Improving your organisations
competence in requirements capture will apply your limited
resources at the point of greatest leverage to increase customer
satisfaction and development team productivity. Research has
shown that although requirements analysis consumes merely 5
percent of software production cost it affords 50 percent of the
leverage to influence improved quality and productivity.

Poor Requirements Waste
Money

A focus on quality requirements
cuts development costs. It takes 100 times more effort to correct
errors discovered in the maintenance phase than it does to
correct the same errors if they are discovered in the
requirements phase of a project.

Correct requirements build quality into your product from the
start. Attempting to test quality into code at the end of a
project is expensive and ineffective. The probability that
defects originating from defective requirements will be
completely rectified decreases as they are allowed to propagate
into designs and code.

This workshop addresses this
emerging discipline of software requirements specification - the
orderly transformation of an end-user problem into a complete
specification of the desired external behaviour of the software
system to be built. It has been developed for purchasers, users
and developers of prespecified software. Participants will be
users with responsibility for specifying their business needs or
information systems professionals charged with specifying the
customers requirements.

Establish the quality of
an existing requirements specification in terms of
completeness, correctness, consistency, ambiguity,
maintainability, designability and testability.

Use the requirements
statement in the development of acceptance test plans.

A Quality Managed Process

Requirements specification is a
key software manufacturing process that directly effects the
quality of the end product. It must therefore come under formal
quality control. That is, the process must be formally defined
with standards and procedures, regularly monitored and
progressively improved. Our workshop materials are formatted to
provide direct input into your Quality Management System.
Standards and procedures provided in the notes are formatted for
compliance with Australian (AS-3563) and international standards
(ISO 9000-3).

Background. Les Chambers is a practising
professional software engineer with extensive experience in the
development of real time and commercial data management systems.
As a software engineer, project manager and information systems
manager with the DOW Chemical Company he developed and installed
several "life-critical" process control systems in
petrochemical plants in the USA, Hong Kong and Australia. In
later years he has consulted on the application of software
quality management techniques to the development of large
commercial transaction processing systems. As principal of
Chambers and Associates he provides software quality, project
management and requirements definition services.

Requirements. His most recent achievements in
requirements capture have been the specification of complex
telecommunications systems for Telecom Australia and project
support applications for Rockwell Ship Systems.

Training Skills. As a trainer his
international experience in the nuts and bolts of developing
reliable software provides a wealth of case studies. In past
workshops he has been consistently highly rated on mastery of his
subject and his ability to motivate the listener.

Education. Les holds a Bachelor of Electrical
Engineering Honours Degree from Queensland University and has
completed quality management system assessor training with
Standards Australia.